Being kind, civil and trying to make an extra effort to avoid confrontations with people is now racist.
Essentially, two communications professors have concluded – in interviews with no fewer than ten white students – that their definition of “civil behavior,” including “treating everyone the same way” and “making an extra effort to be nice to minorities,” constitutes “white privilege” and “white racial power.”
For the two instructors from the University of Northern Iowa, C. Kyle Rudick and Kathryn B. Golsan, even saying they “treat everyone the same” was indicative of the “white racial power” and a “race-evasive strategy” they claim to be exposing.
The two junior-level faculty members interviewed ten white college students and asked them questions like “What do you consider to be civil behavior?” and “How do you think your racial identity may affect your understandings of civility when talking with students of color?”
Clearly, any answer they were going to give would be framed with the racist lens. Here’s their analysis of the results.
“First, participants stated that they tried to avoid talking about race or racism with students of color to minimize the chance that they would say something ‘wrong’ and be labeled a racist,” the professors report. “Another way that participants described how they tried to be civil when interacting with students of color was to be overly nice or polite.”
And that was all racist. Part of “white racial power,” they concluded, according to CampusReform.
Even students who indicated that they treat “everyone the same” were accused of reinforcing white racial power by the professors, who contend that treating everyone the same in the spirit of colorblindness can actually be a “race-evasive” strategy.
In this vein, one interviewee, Ryan, stated, “I feel like I treat everyone the same…To me, if you’re white or black…, then I’m going to treat you like you’re a human being. I guess I don’t see skin color whenever I see someone.”
Criticizing this colorblind strategy, Rudick and Goslan argued that it “functions to erase racial identity in the attempt to impose a race-evasive frame on race-talk.”
To fight this, Rudick and Goslan argue that college professors must intervene, saying, “it is incumbent upon instructors to ensure that their classrooms are spaces that challenge, rather than perpetuate, WIC [whiteness-informed civility].”
How do professors do this? By forcing the white students to talk … on and on and on … about race.
“One way that instructors can challenge the strategies of WIC is by ensuring that White students and students of color engage in sustained, sensitive, and substantive conversations about race and racism,” they suggest.
Rudick and Goslan also say that professors should “encourage White students to understand how using WIC to downplay issues of race or racism in higher education serves to elide their own social location and reinforce the hegemony of White institutional presence.”
These two young – and very white – instructors might need some exposure to the real world, based on the last line of the CampusReform article:
Rudrick told Campus Reform by email that he wrote the article in the spirit of his “continued service to Cthulu,” but did not respond to follow up inquiries. Golsan did not respond at all.
Naïve children with advanced college degrees at a lily-white school. Is there anything more annoying?
from The Federalist Papers http://bitly.com/2ClpgZg
via IFTTT College Professors Declare Classroom ‘Civility’ Is Racist http://bitly.com/2ClpgZg